Thursday, 9 February, 2012

A new year is a chance to bring sanity to our medical, scientific and environmental disasters. Here’s our wish-list for a better New Year!

If (gasp!) the subject is too big for a Whyfile, hit the books. Here, we review four great science books, on evolution, environment, fighting nature, and discovering motherly love.

The solar clock doesn’t quite line up with the atomic clock. We use leap seconds to make them match. Should we dump the leap second?

Bush proposes mission to moon and Mars, but how great are the scientific payoffs of this expensive, risky adventure? Would it be smarter – and cheaper – to send robots?

This Why File surveys the latest in forensic anthropology, with a visit to the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee, AKA The Body Farm.

Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology given to inventors of MRI machine — but were these guys really the inventors? Meet an unprecedented PR campaign to change the Nobel.

Edward Teller helped invent the hydrogen bomb, then pushed missile defense. By public advocacy and secret research, he changed the 20th century.

What was learned on Columbia’s last, tragic mission?

Will terrorists use biological weapons? How have bio-weapons been used in the past?

What are the medical and psychological costs of long-term space travel? Radiation, isolation, osteoporosis: Sounds like a real picnic to us! Intrigued? You could always overwinter in the Antarctic…